Semiconductor device fabrication involves the forming of different components on a substrate using a variety of techniques, such as deposition, patterning, and etching. One component in semiconductor devices is a contact for coupling a layer of material to the underlying substrate or another layer. Depending on the particular application and the desired function, contacts may be holes, vias, channels or other geometric structures.
Efforts to miniaturize the components in a semiconductor device have begun to challenge the tolerance levels of the fabrication equipment. Several efforts attempt to further reduce the layout area of a semiconductor device using the same critical dimension dictated by the tolerances of the fabrication equipment. Existing techniques may offer some space savings by using traditional self-alignment techniques, but fail to accommodate a variety of different semiconductor devices and processes.